change versus more of the same

September 21, 2008

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg spent the first half of this year deciding whether or not to run for president as an independent. On February 28th, he announced that he would not be a candidate. My guess is he wakes up every morning regretting his decision.

At the time, the choice seemed obvious. Bloomberg is an independent (though formerly a Democrat and a Republican) politician focused on achieving common sense solutions by working with both parties. He is open to the best ideas, regardless of where they come from. And he appeals primarily to independents and moderates in both parties.

At the end of February, it was clear that John McCain would be the Republican nominee and an Obama victory seemed imminent. Both candidates were seen as the more moderate, post-partisan choices in each of their fields. Both were willing to break with their party, McCain by opposing a Republican president on a number of issues and exposing corruption in his party, Obama by shocking Democrats with kind words about President Reagan and acknowledging that we should be open to good ideas from Republicans (and that "good ideas from Republicans" isn't an oxymoron). Both candidates relied on crossover and independent voters in some races and regularly reached out to them in their stump speeches.

Lastly, a large focus of the campaign up to that point was foreign policy and the war in Iraq, with McCain winning his race by emphasizing his credentials and support for the surge and Obama focusing on his judgment in opposing the war from the beginning. Though health care and the economy were growing as issues, it was still thought that a city mayor would be at a significant disadvantage in an election dominated by national security.

Bloomberg was going to run only if he was convinced he could win. The possibility of a third party candidate winning the presidency is remote to say the least, especially a short, unmarried, Jewish mayor, as Bloomberg himself often pointed out. But this election seemed stacked against him. Both parties were set to nominate candidates he had spoken highly of in the past and who occupied much of the same ground as himself. Whereas a Hillary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani race (yes, once considered a possibility) would be negative and polarizing (with the added benefit of featuring two candidates he doesn't much care for), Obama and McCain had wide appeal across party lines and were the ones most likely to run respectful campaigns.

Bloomberg made three mistakes: he assumed the race was over, he assumed the core issues of the election were set, and he assumed that the candidates were more important than their parties.

The Race

The Republican race was considered over at the end of February, and the Democratic campaign nearly so. However, on March 4th, Hillary Clinton won Texas and Ohio and made it clear that she intended to compete until the end of the primaries. Later in March, Obama was hit by the Rev. Wright controversy. Soon, the debates and campaign commercials turned much more aggressive and the race increasingly divisive. The race did not end until June 3rd.

The Issues

No one foresaw in February where we are in September. The surge has been so successful that the war in Iraq has largely receded as an issue and it's increasingly likely that the majority of troops will be withdrawn over the next two years regardless of who is elected.

More importantly, the crisis in the mortgage industry and financial markets has now grown into the dominant issue in the campaign. As he showed on Meet the Press this morning, Mayor Bloomberg is uniquely qualified to speak to this problem and would be dominating the debate if he were currently a candidate.

The Parties

Before the Iowa Caucuses, I endorsed John McCain and Barack Obama for president. Believing neither was likely to win, I wrote: "That would truly be a once-in-a-lifetime election as both men believe in appealing to the best in each of us."

The great disappointment over the past four months has been the realization that even the best candidates cannot overcome the parties, the consultants, and the media environment that give us the exact same campaign every four years. If there was one year when things would be different, I honestly thought it would be this one. I was completely wrong.

Soon after Obama won the nomination, he changed his mind on accepting public financing and participating in a series of town hall debates with McCain. After promising a positive campaign that fully respects his opponent, McCain has launched attack after attack, each more cutting and dismissive than the last. Both campaigns regularly twist words, grab a few sentences out of context, reduce votes on complex bills to footnote-based outrage, and generally behave emotional, high-strung teenagers who perceive a slight in everything.

Each party and most of each candidate's supporters believe that they have no choice. You have to hit back harder and faster than your opponent if you want to win. And no matter what your high aspirations are for January, they're irrelevant unless you are victorious in November.

Bloomberg was convinced that these two candidates left no room for an independent, solutions-driven candidate who appealed to moderates and people who believe more in solving problems than assigning blame and taking credit. Who needs an immensely successful businessman, 2-term mayor of the largest city in America, with expertise in domestic and economic issues during a time of war?

We did.

Mayor Bloomberg, like all politicians, is a flawed man with many positions that I do not support. But he had the chance to be the first legitimate third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. His wealth, success, focus on results, and appeal across party lines would have given him a platform to reveal the flaws, corruption, and true silliness of our existing parties and election process. It is nearly impossible for an independent to win the presidency, but I'm convinced that if he had run, and the last few months had played out in an identical fashion, that the polls would show a three-way tie right now.

September 20, 2008

A lot of our conversations with family and friends involve books. Whenever someone asks me what type of books I like to read, the answer is always non-fiction, mostly politics, philosophy, technology and business (wow, that is one of the most boring sentences I have ever written). In fact, I usually have a hard time remembering when I last read any fiction.

But then it occurs to me that I have a wonderful son who I've been reading with for all of his 13 years. There has never been a time when we weren't in the middle of a book together (currently The Underneath). So, I actually read fiction all the time, and love it, it just happens to be out loud.

The same is true with writing. I think of myself as someone who only writes about ideas and politics (and unsurprisingly the rest of the reading material listed above), but each Christmas for the last eight years, I've written a story for one of Ben's presents (often involving cats or one of his current favorite things). So, I actually write fiction all the the time, and love it, it just happens to be for the family.

Each time I read or write fiction though, I'm struck by just how endlessly complicated it is. For me, writing non-fiction is very, very different and much, much easier. Fiction requires mind muscles that must be terribly underused in my case because it is often a painfully slow process. There are more details and decisions in a paragraph of fiction (who's talking? who else is in the room? what is the room like? how does this character talk? how did the talk the last time they spoke? how does this scene relate to what came before and what comes next? are you revealing too much or too little? is the reader asleep at this point? etc...) than a chapter of non-fiction (does this make a point clearly and economically? is it reasonable? does it fit where it is? is it a pleasure to read? does it hold the reader's attention? repeat...).

So, when I started thinking about writing code and writing fiction, I realized that both of these things make my mind work in completely new ways and present unique challenges. After spending many weeks brainstorming ideas for a novel, I have started writing a story about a thought I mentioned a few months ago: don't hate the part of you that most makes you feel alive.

Now, when I say "started writing", I mean there are a few disjointed paragraphs and a Backpack page that makes the newspaper-covered walls in A Beautiful Mind look like a Library of Congress card catalog. I have no illusions about the likelihood that such a project will ever be finished, or if so, published. Without a contract, cash, and a deadline, neither the flesh nor the spirit is willing, more often than not.

But I am having a lot of fun lying in bed each night, thinking about these characters and scribbling fun phrases on scraps of paper. And once in awhile, a couple of sentence come together in such a way that I smile and think, "Is this what it feels like to be a writer?" The funny thing is it happens with a few lines of code sometimes, too.

The one thing I'm struck by is the thought that fiction can be more timeless than non-fiction, and in some cases speak to a reader in a much more personal way. I think I'd like to give that a try.

September 18, 2008

A few months ago, I started a fun little experiment. I wondered what it would be like to learn how to write code and fiction at the same time. I've dabbled in both over the years, making minimal progress and slowly moving on to things that are, well, easier, at least for me. But its become clear recently that these really are dreams of mine, they are part of who I want to be rather than just skills I want to acquire.

Programming has been part of my life since I was a teenager learning Basic on my TI-99/4A. In high school, I took a Pascal class, which I loved. In college, I chose a computer science class (C, of course) for one of my electives, partly because it gave me access to a sweet lab of NeXT boxes. I enjoyed the class enough to briefly consider extending my education for a couple of years to major in computer science, but decided my philosophy degree was more than enough to launch me into the job market.

The next few years involved more dabbling in this and that, mostly in my free time, until I had the chance to write some .NET code, accessing web services in C#. At the same time, I was starting to learn a lot more about server administration, networking, web servers and databases. I took a Java class as well as some Microsoft courses, which tend to be more about the tools (I probably learned more about Visual Studio than actual programming).

I had the opportunity to continue down the development path, but could not turn down the chance to lead a web team. I loved being able to set the direction, manage people and touch all the different parts of web projects, but it also kept me far from development. Thankfully I was wise enough to move our platform to open source, so I gained a lot of experience with (and appreciation for) PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache, Linux, and the command line.

My son started being curious about programming around this time, which launched me on a obsessive (and ongoing) search for the best way for a beginner to learn how to program. Eventually, I realized that this was maybe a little bit for me as well (hey, some dads make their kids play football). I hope to write a post eventually on what I learned along the way, but the short answer is Ruby and Chris Pine's book.

A year ago, I had the incredible opportunity to join a web startup. The fact that it was a Ruby on Rails shop made it even more attractive, and I've be able to learn a huge amount about the full Rails stack from my ridiculously talented co-workers. This taste has only made me want to learn more.

I've spent a lot of evenings over the last few months reading some terrific development books, watching screencasts, and writing some rudimentary code. Ruby truly is a revelation. You hear the words "joy" and "happiness" used over and over again when people talk about Ruby and Rails, and it's true. Whenever you think, "I don't know how to do this, but it would make sense if it was something like this", it usually turns out to be true. Compared to most languages, the code is so simple and readable. Most anyone could understand Ruby code and learn to write it with a bit of instruction. It's the perfect language for a beginner and I hope it becomes common in high school computer classes.

I just got back from Denver, where I was privileged to spend 3 days with two of the top Ruby on Rails experts around, Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler. Pragmatic Studio's Rails class was the best training I have ever had. Just 40 students in a comfortable room, tons of coding opportunities, and entertaining instructors with heavy real world knowledge. Now it's time to put the books down and write.

Sometimes I wonder why I've never lost my interest in programming. Developers are like the carpenters of old, people who can take a pencil drawing and build something real out of it. I love the problem solving aspect of writing code, along with the power to make ideas happen. And I admit to being intrigued by the art of it as well, the drive to write beautiful code, constantly editing and improving until it is truly creative, elegant and expressive.

September 13, 2008

This blog has slowly gone quiet over the past few months. There is a certain rhythm to blogging that is hard to maintain unless you allow your commitment to your blog to supersede other priorities. The single thing I ever did to become good at blogging was committing to posting at least once a day. Like nearly anything else you want to master, daily effort is the key. I did it for years and truly loved the challenge of finding something to write about each and every day.

Writing hundreds of blog posts opened the door to an entirely different form of writing, a book. I knew when I signed the contract for The Blogging Church that writing tens of thousands of words on my blog did not truly prepare me for writing a book, and I was right. The book writing process was so different and much more challenging. I had to learn to think very differently about developing thoughts and arguments, being consistent in style but not repetitive in method, and keeping a reader entertained for more than five minutes at a time. I loved that year immensely, despite many late and somewhat miserable nights, and the feedback I've received from many of you has truly meant the world to me.

The first question after you write a book is, "What is your next book going to be about?" I actually think about that just about every day, but that's how my mind has always worked - brainstorming new ideas, thinking through the best ones, and then moving on. I have yet to find the perfect idea for another book, not because there is an absence of good choices, but because I'm impatient and restless, and highly resistant to repeating a formula.

And that's what a blog often becomes eventually: repetitive. Many times over the past year I've thought about writing a post and then realized that I had said much of it before, just in a different context. I'm not convinced that it's worth my time, or yours, to rehash those thoughts and arguments for whatever happens to be demanding our attention today. Similarly, I've stopped reading most of the top blogs for the same reason. After a few years, you begin to see the same ideas, the same patterns, the same arguments, repeated again and again. Life's too short.

Not long after the book was published, I left the church world to join a web start-up. I wanted to be challenged in new ways and to be exposed to new ideas. It's been an incredible, addictive experience so far, though it's certainly taken me far from my comfort zone. If I had stayed in the church web world, I might be speaking at some small church technology conferences, writing posts every day about the latest web tools and controversies, and working on "The Social Church: Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet Church". Many smart, talented people (and friends of mine) are wired up that way, but not me. I already did that once.

Over the past few months, I've been pouring all of my free time into learning to write in two new ways, code and fiction. I'll be writing about these more over the next two posts. No surprises, no big announcements, just the latest explorations of one of my favorite things in this world, writing.

It's a fun treat to have a book focused on the digital world available digitally. Almost cool enough for me to justify the $359 cost of the Kindle :)

If you're just tuning in, The Blogging Church is a book I wrote (with Terry Storch) that was published early last year. It made a passionate case for using blogs to share the story of your church or organization with both the committed and the curious and featured a lot of terrific advice from talented bloggers in and out of the church world. One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin wrote some kind words about The Blogging Church on its release: "Brian Bailey makes two things crystal clear in this book: if you've got a church, then you need to spread your story. And if you need to spread your story, blogs are now an essential tool. Time to pay attention!"

If you have a Kindle and happen to buy the book, email me a nice pic of The Blogging Church on the Kindle and I'll be happy to send you an autographed copy of the dead tree version.

June 29, 2008

We Baileys love books, but we also love watching movies. This summer, we thought we'd have fun with a weekly summer movie. Each week we'll choose a guilty movie treat - funny family films to watch with our 12-year old son that are just pure enjoyment. A few are consistent favorites, but we'd also like to include some new ones. It helps if they have a summer theme, but that's not required. What is required is that they be ridiculously entertaining.

Here's a list of movies under consideration so far. Feel free to steal a few for your own summer movie festival, but then share some of your ideas in the comments - we'd love to hear them!

June 22, 2008

Today is Sunday and soon Meet the Press will be on with Brian Williams filling in for Tim Russert. I have been watching Meet the Press regularly since Russert took over in 1991 and you could say religiously for the past 10 years. In fact, we do a family list each year of our favorite books, shows, music, etc... and Meet the Press has made my list every time.

This puts me into the category of a political junkie, but when it comes to political television, Meet the Press has been my only fix. I've rarely watched other political shows and I don't know if I've ever felt I was missing anything.

Though thousands of words have been written about Tim Russert's death, I am compelled to add a few of my own. Tim was the best political analyst, reporter, and interviewer I have ever seen. His words were always valuable, well-reasoned, and full of unique insight into the world of politics. When The Today Show would feature a political discussion, I would be largely oblivious until I heard, "Tim Russert joins us from..." That's when I knew it was time to pay attention.

More important that his pure skills were two things: his class and his joy. Tim treated everyone at his table with respect, a lesson in old-fashioned hospitality that unfortunately stands out. No one received a free pass, but no one was treated unfairly either. It was clear that he valued his guests and believed that more often than not, they were determined to do what was best for the country. I was always struck by how Russert ended nearly every interview with a presidential candidate: "Thank you for sharing your views. Stay safe on the campaign trail." Such class.

His love for politics was so clear, as was the joy it brought him. His enthusiasm was infectious. You got the feeling at the end of each week that he wished he could continue the conversation for another hour and absolutely could not wait for the next show. He never took for granted that he was paid so well to do what he'd loved so much. A life filled with full appreciation for the blessings all around you is a truly great life.

Of course, his love of his family, especially his son Luke, and his faith stood out as well. When else has faith been mentioned so much when someone other than a religious leader passes away? I wonder if people would say the same about me. The best thing a death can offer those who are left behind is the chance to reexamine your own life with a fresh perspective. Don't miss Peggy Noonan's thoughts on that very subject.

The simplest thing I can say about Tim Russert is that Meet the Press was the only political show I would consider sharing with Lori and particularly my son Ben. We watched many interviews and debates together as a family during this amazing presidential election. I'm very protective of Ben and Tim was the only person I trusted to give a fair, respectful, patriotic, and passionate introduction to politics. I'm just sad that the time was so short.

May 31, 2008

If you use Backpack, the organizing web tool and intranet from 37signals, you may sometimes wish you could modify the text on a page to fit a little more information on it. I have a page where I collect code snippets and terminal commands and the default font seems a bit large with so much content. Turns out there's an easy solution to this: simply add a small amount of CSS to the page in the form of a note and you can change the formatting to meet your needs.

I've known this was possible for a long time, but finally took the time to figure it out the other day. After a few experiments, I came up with a solution that works great for me. Those of you with actual CSS skills may find much to laugh at with this example - feel free to post improvements. Plus, there is much more that can be done once someone with design skills starts playing with it.

To do this yourself, just create a new note on a page with what you see above (I like to put the note at the bottom). As soon as you save it, refresh the page to see the changes. Feel free to experiment with the font sizes (just change 14px and 12px) and the title colors (color:brown).

Here are two examples, with the standard version first. Check out these ideas if you'd like to explore further. Enjoy!

April 22, 2008

Hillary Clinton has won Pennsylvania by at least 10 points and like Punxsutawney Phil has guaranteed another six weeks of campaigning. I thought it would be closer, and hoped it would be close enough to justify her leaving the race. No such luck.

As much as Obama's nomination retains its sense of inevitability, this is not good news for his campaign. At this point in the race, with so much momentum and money on his side, why do a majority of Democratic voters continue to keep Obama at arm's length? State after state has had the opportunity to end the race and each time, the vote has gone to Clinton.

I have to agree with the Clinton camp at this point. There is no reason for her to drop out and her continued success (even built on so much unpleasantness) shows that Obama has some serious weaknesses as a candidate. Unfortunately for the Democrats, after each election the number of voters who say they'll vote for John McCain if their candidate doesn't win goes up.

If you want to understand the state of the never-ending race, look no further than today's column by Maureen Dowd - Wilting Over Waffles. It's a brilliant and entertaining piece. There are so many terrific lines I could quote the whole piece, but I'll limit myself to these two:

Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran?

Despite all his incandescent gifts, Obama has missed several opportunities to smash the ball over the net and end the game. Again and again, he has seemed stuck at deuce.